Workbook Views and Using the Zoom Feature in Microsoft Excel 2016
During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, you will learn about the different workbook views and how you can use them. We will also demontsrate zooming in/out and freezing panes.
Video Transcript
In this section we’re going to look at Viewing in Excel 2016. You’ve already seen a few aspects of that but I’d like to fill out a bit more of the detail. And the first thing we’re going to do is to select the View Tab on the Ribbon.
Now the left most group on the View Tab is the Workbook Views Group and there are actually four options here: Normal, Page Break View, Page Layout View, and Custom Views. Now Custom Views are out of scope for this course so we’re only going to look at Normal, Page Break View and Page Layout View. I mentioned the three of these earlier on in the course and those three option correspond to the three buttons down towards the right hand end of the Status Bar. So you can actually use those buttons to switch between the three views.
Now in reality you can work in any one of the three views. There are a few restrictions and constraints and most of the time most people use Normal View but you may sometimes find it convenient to use the other two.
Page Break View is very often used to preview printing. So let’s suppose you wanted to print out this list of the top 50 movies and you wanted to see how it was going to be on paper. And if you look at this particular example you can see the big Page 1 in the middle there. If you look towards the bottom of it you’ll see a blue dashed line which indicates a page break. And in fact that’s one of the reasons it’s called Page Break View. You can see where the page breaks would occur if you just printed this worksheet now with the current printer settings.
Now as far as printer settings are concerned we’re going to look at those in the next section. And the page breaks when you are printing a worksheet from a workbook will depend not only on how much data you’ve got on the sheet of course but things like the font size in use and the size of the paper you’re printing on to the orientation of the paper. Are you using landscape or portrait orientation, for example? So there are many factors that come into the determination of where pages break. And the issue of page break is one of the ones we’re going to be looking at particularly in the next section.
The third option, Page Layout View, gives you some very straightforward facilities for adding headers to pages and for adjusting margins and so on. So you can use that if you like to fine tune how the pages are going to look when you print them.
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Now we’re going to cover those printing options and the many aspects of Page Layout View in the next section as well.
So for the moment let’s go back into Normal View and let’s take a look at the Zoom functionality.
Now I demonstrated to you a couple of times earlier on. You have the Zoom Slider down there in the bottom right hand end of the Status Bar and you have a number of ways of using the Zoom Slider. You can either click and hold the slider, slide it backwards and forwards to adjust the view or you can use the minus button there which effectively zooms out, plus button to zoom in or you can just click on that number there, the zoom level. Now if you click on that you get this little Zoom Dialogue. And the Zoom Dialogue lets you zoom to a specific magnification, 100%, 200%, etcetera. Then you click on OK and you’ll see your worksheets at that particular magnification. And then you have options there for those fixed sizes or in fact you can click in this box and type in a custom magnification.
There is another option on there, that’s Fit Selection. Let me just cancel here for the moment. I’m just going to zoom out. Let’s suppose that I selected the title and say the first 25 movies, made a selection, and now what I do is say Fit Selection, click on OK and it will zoom to the selection I made, the top 25 movies.
The corresponding controls on the Ribbon there for that are in the Zoom Group. So you’ve got a Zoom button, you’ve got a 100% button which will zoom the document to 100% and you’ve got a Zoom to Selection button as well.
Now of course if you’re using a touch device of course apart from those controls you can use pinch and stretch to achieve zoom. So let me just pinch this particular sheet now and of course I can stretch it out as well.
And then one other thing I’d like to show you here is Freezing Panes.
Now it’s not immediately apparent from this straightforward list of movies but you can get problems where you have many columns of data and perhaps quite structured rows and columns that as you scroll up and down and across a sheet you can lose header information. Let me give you an example here.
Here we just have two columns, title and year of release. And if I scroll down as I get to the movies further down the list you see that I’ve lost the header. Now in this case it’s not very difficult because it’s pretty obvious that column A is a title, column B is probably a year of release. But if you had other information such as, for example, director and photographer you may not know which column was the director and which column was the photographer and maybe which column showed the person in charge of special effects and so on.
Now what you can do is that you can Freeze rows and columns of your worksheets to make it easier for people to understand the data. And let’s suppose that I wanted to Freeze, in this case just the top row. In the Window Group on the View Tab there is a Freeze Panes button with a dropdown. And I’m going to choose first of all Freeze Top Row and you should just about have seen a little line appear at the bottom of the top row. The top row is now frozen. Watch what happens as I scroll now. You see that the title remains in place.
Now you should also be able to see that if I had many other columns of information, such as director, location of filming, photographer, producer, and so on that would soon go off the right hand end and as I scroll left and right across the sheet I would lose the name of the movie. Well supposing I wanted to keep the top row with the headings and the name of the movie. So I want to keep the top row and the left most column. Let me first of all stop freezing the top row. So I’m going to click on Unfreeze Panes there. And then I click in the cell that is below the rows that I want to freeze and to the right of the columns I want to freeze. So I want to freeze just the top row so I’m going to click below the top row. And I want to freeze just the left hand column. So I click to the right of the left hand column which means I’m going to click in cell B2. So that’s below the top row and to the right of the left most column. Now I go back to Freeze Panes and click on Freeze Panes. It’s now frozen row 1 and column A. And as I scroll about, move about within the sheet, you’ll see that they stay frozen.
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So that gives me the facility to keep headings and other identifiers in view. Whenever I’ve had something frozen I can unfreeze it with an Unfreeze Panes there from the menu. And also there’s an option there to just freeze the first column. So I’m going to Unfreeze Panes on this worksheet and that’s freezing panes.
That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!